Impact

GiveGetWin is a 100% volunteer organization founded in 2012. We’ve been focused on innovation in philanthropy, charity projects, and educational and career outcomes for young people.

Charity Projects

GiveGetWin started with a simple idea: young people aren’t involved in philanthropy and making an impact on the world as much as they could be because they’re so busy with the demands of modern life. And yet, this generation has a deep drive towards both mastery and meaning.

Starting in 2012, we proved out a “charity deals” model to fund charity projects. We help companies and experts set up charity deals with 100% of proceeds going to charity. Companies and experts do it for a wide variety of reasons — it lets them do good for the world, lets them test brand-new cutting edge offerings in a friendly setting, and gets greater exposure.

The volunteers who put charity deals together learn an immense amount of how to actually make things happen. The skills needed to put a charity deal together are all the skills of modern entrepreneurship: understanding people, vision, communication skills, marketing, distribution, follow through, and delivering great service and experiences. It also requires solid productivity, organization, and technology usage.

100% of the proceeds from these deals go to charity. We run with zero salaries, zero benefits, and zero convenience expenses — our team participates because they love it, to do good for the world, and for the personal growth that comes along with it.

Deals go to benefit charity projects in the developing world that are led by pro-social, effective, highly competent leaders.

We back projects like SunSaluter’s Kuturapali Solar Village in Odisha, India. Agriculture is the primarily livelihood of the families in Odisha, and the Solar Village brings a mix of solar power, charging stations, drip irrigation, and electricity to hundreds of families.

The project lead on Kuturapali was Sun Saluter (based out of New York, NY and Bhubaneswar, India) with implementation partners ASTHA and and Kalinga Renewable Energy.

We were one of three organizations funding Sun Saluter’s Kuturapali Solar Village, alongside the United Nations Development Programme and the Government of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy.

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Career Impact

The GiveGetWin methodology reliably teaches entrepreneurship and leadership skills in a demanding, but safe and supportive context.

One of the essential things we judge ourselves by is the career outcomes of participating and learning with us. We have intensive skills trainings in entrepreneurship, like the annual program we run at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Entrepreneurship Center, as well as a wide variety of brief skills trainings.

All of these provided completely for free to participants; we’re able to not charge since mentors who have achieved immense success in the private sector and in entrepreneurship like the mission and instruct for free, and we’ve been able to partner with a number of top educational institutions who like the practical career outcomes we assist people in reaching and the rigorous-but-accessible programming we run.

GiveGetWin alum have gone on to start successful companies at a very high rate. For instance, Zach Obront volunteered at GiveGetWin from April 2013 to April 2014. Since then, he’s gone on to found BookInABox, a company revolutionizing the publishing field.

In under two years of Zach’s leadership, BookInABox became a multi-million dollar technology company in its space, with over $3 million in revenues in its second year of operating.

Zach is a tremendous success, but not an aberration: 2015 summer program attendees Russell Silver and Ester Ciurana went on to start a one-click customer surveying tech company and a creative marketing agency, respectively. Charbel Bourjas of Northwestern University attended GGWSC at UChicago in August 2016, and immediately applied the skillset to start a company focused on vending machines with eco-friendly disposable batteries for recharging one’s mobile phone, pre-sold numerous of his devices, and began a production run while incorporating his company.

You don’t need to be wanting to start a startup or your own benefit to train with GiveGetWin — just wanting to make an impact on the world. We’ve seen attendees go on to do terrific things in academia, nonprofits, small companies, and large companies. In the current day and age, entrepreneurial skills are life skills — they’re how to make things happen, and we’re proud to help participants in our programs and volunteers continue to develop their careers while building a variety of practical skills to have an impact on the world.

Educational Impact

Over the last decade, the demand in higher education for programming related to entrepreneurship and innovation has grown tremendously, and we’ve been honored to have collaborations with some of the finest educational institutions in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Colombia, with our first collaborations coming to Western and Central Europe in Autumn 2017.

We work closely every summer with the University of Chicago at the Polsky Exchange, and we bring the “Gotta Be Good Tour” to dozens of universities including El CESA, CU Boulder, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, NYU, UBC Vancouver, UCLA, UFlorida Gainesville, and many others. The Tour gets wide praise —

“One of the best meetings at The Entrepreneurship Club, probably one of the best interactive sessions I have been to in my life!” — Aniruddh Ravindran, University of Florida, Gainesville

We believe in being valuable, serving, and working with great people on meaningful projects; we do it because we love it. We think that shows through — we aim to pack events full of valuable practical insights from world-class experts that can immediately improve attendee’s lives and careers.

As always, we’re 100% volunteer — speakers and coordinators use their own funds to go on tour, and we’re honored to work with top administrators, professors, and student leaders to bring great events to campus.